Screening for Sarcopenia

Sarcopenia is recognized today as a real public health issue. In order to reduce its public health burden, screening for sarcopenia is essential to act early and thus prevent the occurrence of adverse health events. Screening for sarcopenia also avoids the need for unnecessary resource-consuming diagnostic procedures. Several screening tools for sarcopenia exists: the SARC-F questionnaire, the calf circumference, the SARC-F-CalF, the Mini Sarcopenia Risk Assessment, the Ishii score, the equation of Yu, the screening grid of Goodman, the chair and stand test, the finger-ring test, the gripBMI, the Tawaïn Risk Score for sarcopenia, and the red flag method. As the choice of a screening instrument is quite large, it can sometimes be difficult for the clinician to determine which one is the most suitable. Studies have therefore been carried out to compare the performance of different screening tools for sarcopenia. Statistically, the Ishii score offers the best performance (with an area under the curve of 0.914). SARC-F-CalF also exhibits interesting properties. Overall, all of the screening tools for sarcopenia are very effective in detecting the absence of the disease (i.e., high specificity). It is, however, important to remember that the choice of a screening tool is made on the basis of the performance of the tool and also on the basis of other criteria such as its ease of implementation, its reliability, and its acceptability by the population. Therefore, in view of these criteria, the screening tool recommended by scientific societies remains the SARC-F, which is easy to use, reliable, and very well accepted.